fettig.net

I’ve been trying something new this week - that fresh, modern editor knows as Emacs. Emacs itelf isn’t actually new, of course (it’s actually older than I am). Still, it’s exciting to have discovered it, just as I have previously been excited to discover vinyl records, typewriters, The Pixies, sushi, Woody Allen, Apple computers, Charles Mingus, Linux, Python, and espresso, things which had existed for years without my noticing, but which I suddenly developed an appreciation for.

Emacs had always been one of those things that I vaguely knew I might want to try eventually, but never had. Previously I’d gotten as far as reading “To save, type Control-x, Control-s”, and given it up as far too complicated. But I knew that a lot of smart people used Emacs, and Neal Stevenson’s description of it (from In The Beginning Was the Command Line) always stuck in my head:

It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text.

So this week, when I mentioned something about text editors in a conversation with my new boss, and he suggested Emacs, I was finally ready to give it a try. Actually, I was ready to do more than give it a try - I was ready to switch to Emacs as my full-time programming environment, at least for the immediate future. It’s funny how switches go - it’s not that I was necessarily unhappy with Eclipse, which I had been using, or consciously thinking “It’s time to switch text editors”. I was feeling open to change, though, and Emacs just felt right.

So far, I’m digging it. I haven’t had a chance to really play with python-mode yet, but I’ve enjoyed editing some plain text documents. Favorite features so far: Meta-q (reflow the current paragraph), and they way it figures out what you’re trying to do with indentation and alters the function of the tab key to do the right thing. Oh, and that Tetris implementation is pretty nice too!

So, after a few months of weighing my options, reading numerous reviews and blogs, and saving my money, I went out and bought an iBook G4 (the little 12″ one). I’ve had it for a little over a week now, and I like it a lot. Here are my notes, so far:

• Somewhere (probably in one of the MacRumors forums) I had read that the Apple retail stores sometime sell open-box (a.k.a “refreshed”) models at discounts. So I asked the friendly salesperson at the Cambridge Apple Store if they happened to have any open-box 12″ iBooks… and they did! Not a scratch on it, clean OS install, same packaging and warranty as a new one, $150 off.
• This baby has great battery life. The PC laptops I’ve used up ’till now have gotten about 2.5 hours, tops. My iBook can run off the battery for 4-5 hours, even when I’ve been spinning the combo drive or using the wireless card.
• OS X is pretty nice. I installed Debian Linux (with help from this excellent HOWTO), but I’m booting into OS X as the default for now. The attention to detail in both the hardware and software is impressive. When I plugged in a USB printer, OS X silently set it up as my default printer - including an icon, not of a generic printer, but of my exact model.
• I bought a 512M RAM chip from Crucial, and I can report that their product and service was excellent. My chip came two days after I ordered it, even though I’d got a warning through email that their stock was low and it might take as long as 8 days to ship. The shipping was free, and sometime between the time I ordered and the time it shipped their price dropped a few dollars, so they applied the savings to my order.
• The Airport Extreme card surprised me by getting way better reception than the PC card I’d been using in my old notebook Previously I couldn’t get a connection outside of the apartment, but today I walked down the hall and down two flights of stairs, and could still surf the web. Amazing. It must be that built-in antenna. Also, I didn’t have any problems connecting to a Linksys 802.11b router, despite some reports of compatiblity problems between the two. The only downside is that the specifications for the Airport Extreme card are closed, so there’s no Linux driver yet. Hopefully the manufacturer will release the specs eventually, but for now I’m OK with booting into OS X when I need to use a wireless connection.

So I guess you can count me among the switchers. I’m certainly very happy with my purchase. For what I was looking for - something portable, durable, and with good battery life - I don’t think there’s anything that could beat it.